Posts

By Frances Cleaver - How can we best understand the ways in which environmental governance is enacted through institutions and the variable outcomes produced? Can an institutional focus illuminate how power is exercised, and the ways in which different actors respond to power dynamics? In this piece I outline how processes of institutional bricolage, and the exercise of agency by bricoleurs, shapes the governance of resources in the green economy.

By Shai Divon - The British philosopher Bertrand Russell, recounts in his volume on power a story told by Confucius about a woman he saw wailing by a grave:
“Your wailing”, said he, “is that one who has suffered sorrow on sorrow”. She replied, “This is so. Once my husband’s father was killed here by a tiger. My husband was also killed, and now my son has died in the same way.” The Master said, “why do you not leave this place?”. The answer was “There is no oppressive government here.” The Master then said, “Remember this my children, oppressive government is more terrible than Tigers”.
This story epitomizes the complicated ecological interactions between humans and ‘nature’, as well as the added complexity occurring through the politics of ‘nature’...

By Connor J. Cavanagh - Today, it seems that we all have the environment on our minds. Even Leonardo DiCaprio recently took a break from his alleged philandering and super yacht chartering to intone upon us commoners about the global environmental crisis, resulting in the National Geographic-produced and Netflix-hosted documentary Before the Flood. Waxing poetic on Hieronymus Bosch’s fifteenth century painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, DiCaprio narrates in the film’s introduction that the Earth is akin to a “paradise that has been degraded and destroyed.” “We are knowingly doing this”, he continues, “I just want to know how far we’ve gone, and if there’s anything we can do to stop it.”...